Saturday, October 29, 2011
katharineholt: On Thursday I went to a dissertation defense at IMLI, the Institute for World Literature, having been invited by the girl defending, a young and very smart Platonov scholar whom I met at a conference in Belgium last May. Unlike dissertation defenses at Columbia, defenses here are public. And this one, at least, involved an hour-long procedure with strict protocols. (This included a short presentation about the dissertation defendant, a presentation by the dissertation defendant, a few words from the first and second readers, a time for open discussion, and then voting in a secret ballot box—the final tally was 16-0 in favor of her passing.) It seems rather terrifying (since it’s not a pure formality), and I’m sure it is, though but for comparison, at Columbia you meet behind closed doors with your committee and two external readers and field questions you might not have been expecting, whereas in this system the defendant has already read the prepared comments from the readers and so is ready to respond as necessary to criticisms. So each system has its terrors… Anyway, after the defense the dissertation committee and all the defendant’s guests were invited to a  ”чаепите” (“tea-drinking” literally, though this was more than just tea) in the institute’s basement, where the Platonov group’s offices are and where Platonov’s archive is housed. For two hours we all sat at this long table, ate, and toasted one another. Well, I was too shy and too removed from the action to toast personally, but virtually all the 20 or so other people gathered did. This was not my first time at such a long Russian table or my first time hearing toasts, but still this made a real impression on me: the toasts were extraordinary (the wordweaving that your average Russian of a certain age is capable of!), the room was full of experts on Russian literature (one of the toasts was from a Tolstoy scholar and was full of references to War and Peace), and I was continually plied with salads and red caviar and wine. In those couple of hours, I have to say, I felt very full of love for Russian culture. Can I import this for my defense c. 2013?

katharineholt:

On Thursday I went to a dissertation defense at IMLI, the Institute for World Literature, having been invited by the girl defending, a young and very smart Platonov scholar whom I met at a conference in Belgium last May. Unlike dissertation defenses at Columbia, defenses here are public. And this one, at least, involved an hour-long procedure with strict protocols. (This included a short presentation about the dissertation defendant, a presentation by the dissertation defendant, a few words from the first and second readers, a time for open discussion, and then voting in a secret ballot box—the final tally was 16-0 in favor of her passing.) It seems rather terrifying (since it’s not a pure formality), and I’m sure it is, though but for comparison, at Columbia you meet behind closed doors with your committee and two external readers and field questions you might not have been expecting, whereas in this system the defendant has already read the prepared comments from the readers and so is ready to respond as necessary to criticisms. So each system has its terrors…

Anyway, after the defense the dissertation committee and all the defendant’s guests were invited to a  ”чаепите” (“tea-drinking” literally, though this was more than just tea) in the institute’s basement, where the Platonov group’s offices are and where Platonov’s archive is housed. For two hours we all sat at this long table, ate, and toasted one another. Well, I was too shy and too removed from the action to toast personally, but virtually all the 20 or so other people gathered did. This was not my first time at such a long Russian table or my first time hearing toasts, but still this made a real impression on me: the toasts were extraordinary (the wordweaving that your average Russian of a certain age is capable of!), the room was full of experts on Russian literature (one of the toasts was from a Tolstoy scholar and was full of references to War and Peace), and I was continually plied with salads and red caviar and wine. In those couple of hours, I have to say, I felt very full of love for Russian culture. Can I import this for my defense c. 2013?

Posted at 3:52 PM 3 notes Reblogged from katharineholt

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